Social Media Marketing Tutorial

Want to get an overview of social media marketing quickly? What to learn basics of Social Media Marketing in a nutshell? If yes, this concise yet informative Social Media Marketing tutorial will fulfill your requirements.

Social media penetration is at almost 2.8 billion active users worldwide

Social media penetration is at almost 2.8 billion active users worldwide (and growing) at the moment. This is a huge number. When such a large number of the world population is on social media networks, Marketers cannot afford to miss reaching out to them via this medium. In this Social Media Marketing Tutorial in the form of an article, you will get to know the definition of social media marketing, social media channels overview, how to create social media strategy followed by social media marketing video tutorials.

So, let’s begin with the definition of social media marketing.

What is Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is the process of promotion of products or services using different features of social networks.

Some of the most popular social media networks are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat.

People use these social networks primarily to connect with their friends. But they also use it to follow the brands they like for latest offers or updates. Facebook is the big daddy of social networking and will cross 2 billion user base anytime soon. This means that if a brand is not promoting itself on social media, they are missing a big pie of business!

Social Media Channels Overview

Facebook has already crossed 2 billion user base by end of June. And India is the largest country for it with more than 241 million monthly active users! Mark Zuckerberg announced the milestone of crossing 2 billion users on 27th June with the following post:

If you see the image below taken from a latest joint report “Global Statshot” by We Are Social and Hootsuite, you can observe that the top most social media channels right now in the world are:

Facebook

YouTube

Instagram

Twitter

Snapchat

Pinterest

LinkedIn

Top Social Networks Worldwide

Let me give you an overview of some of these important channels one-by-one:

Facebook

Using Facebook, you can market to almost all sets of customers using Pages, Groups, and Ads. B2C as well as B2B. Why I mentioned B2B because almost every social media user is present on Facebook. So, with the right targeting, you can reach out to the business customer too on it.Facebook allows deep targeting through its Ads Manager and Power Editor. You can promote your content or create an ad campaign to reach out to target customers based on age, location, gender, interests, devices, and networks.You can also save these audiences (called custom audiences). And to expand your reach further you can also create Lookalike audience based on your custom audience, which means audience which is similar to your custom audience.With each Facebook ads account, you get a unique Facebook Pixel (which you have to add to header tag on your website’s code). Here’s detailed post on Facebook marketing.

Instagram

Instagram is owned by Facebook and enjoys current user base of more than 700 million worldwide. Being a mobile first platform, it is increasingly popular among teenagers and young adults. So, if you are a brand target young customers, you must have a presence on Instagram. Moreover, the Ad Platforms of Instagram and Facebook are deeply integrated with each other. So you can extend the reach of your existing Facebook ads to Instagram or launch Instagram ads in solitude too. Here’s detailed post on setting up and utilizing Instagram for business.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is very popular among corporate professionals, primarily for networking with each other. This makes it an excellent marketing platform for B2B marketers. You can create company page as well as groups on LinkedIn to market your products or services.LinkedIn also has its own ads platform to launch CPC or CPM based ads to generate leads. You can also purchase InMails to directly message the person of your choice in their inbox. This is particularly useful is you are connected to the person, to whom you want to reach out for your business. Here’s an article to learn details about LinkedIn marketing.

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Snapchat

Snapchat is fast emerging as the most popular channel among teenagers. So more brands targeting teenagers it is a potential goldmine. But a lot of marketers are struggling with Snapchat platform because of its fleeting nature (photos or videos disappearing after some time), as well as its unique features which are quite different from other social media platforms. Here’s article to learn details about how to use Snapchat for business.

Twitter

Twitter has struggled to grow in the past few years and has lagged behind platforms like Facebook and Instagram. But still, it is quite a useful platform for marketers. Twitter started with a limit of 140 characters (which is still there) per update but it has included lots of features and rich media (Photos and Videos) to make its platform visually interactive and more useful.In India, Twitter may not be that popular, but in the USA, it is still a very popular medium used by both B2B and B2C marketers. I wrote an article sometime back to utilize Twitter for B2B marketers. You will find some useful tips in this article.

Since now you have an overview of social media marketing and social media channels, next step in this social media marketing tutorial is to learn how to create a social media strategy.

How To Create Social Media Strategy

From a brand’s perspective and as a social media professional, you need to take care of following aspects to create a well-defined social media strategy:

Set Social Media Goals

Why do you want to be on social media in the first place? What do you want to achieve? Some of the potential social media goals which you can set are:

Increase Brand Awareness

Drive Traffic to Website

Generate Sales/Leads

Build Social Media Communities

Implement Social Customer Service

Social Media Listening

This is very important to keep track of your brand mentions. How can you resolve customer complaints or reply to negative comments of irate customers if you are not even aware that they are talking about you? Even in the case of positive comments, you need to amplify such messages and thank those users for the same.You can use any free social media listening tools like Hootsuite, Social Mention, Simply Measured and Cyfe. Google Alerts is also a highly useful tool to keep track of your brand mentions across the web.

Choose Right Social Media Channels

If you do social media listening well, choosing the right social media channels for your business will be a cake walk. Just create profiles where your customers are active. For example, for B2B, LinkedIn is the best platform while to target teenagers Snapchat is a great platform.

Create a Brand Personality

You should be human in your approach while interacting with people on social media. People like to have one-on-one interaction. Semi-formal and an honest approach works well on social media. Some brands follow an approach wherein the community manager ends the reply with their signature/names as shown in the following tweet:

Sorry for the trouble.We request you to share complete store address with pin code for further assistance.

Measure and Analyze Results

Measuring and analyzing social media metrics is a good way to see whether you are on track or not. All the major social media networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram etc. have their own native analytics platforms. You also need to integrate Google Analytics with your company website to track traffic coming in from different sources, including social media. Needless to say, amplify what works, and tweak or weed out what doesn’t.

This is a nice basic plan which you can create to stay on the top. More information related to this can be found in the detailed Infographic below:

How to create social media strategy: An Infographic

In the next section of this Social Media Marketing Tutorial, you can watch some informative social media marketing videos.

Social Media Marketing Video Tutorials

Some of you might like to learn by watching videos on YouTube. If you would like to learn by watching a video, here is 67 minutes long social media marketing video tutorial:

Hope you like it.

In case you want to learn Social Media Marketing Tutorial in Hindi, then the following video can be of help to you:

Conclusion

I am hopeful that the information and the resources which I have shared in this article will help you to get a decent overview of social media marketing. The free social media tutorials in this article in the form of concepts and videos will definitely help you to draw an actionable social media marketing plan for your company. We’d recommend you to enroll for our Social Media Marketing training course led by industry experts who would help you enrich the knowledge base in this fraternity.

Harman has executed a wide variety of Digital Marketing campaigns across different companies and marketing agencies in the last 8 years. After working full-time with different organizations, he is currently working as a freelance digital marketing consultant. His interests include reading books and taking a walk amidst greenery.